24 April,
In Conversation / Non-Fiction /
Sinéad Morrissey and Joe Dunthorne in Conversation
Friday, 24 April 2026, 1:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €10/12
Book NowJoin Sinéad Morrissey and Joe Dunthorne to discuss their new memoirs about individual and collective inheritance and familial love and loss.
Sinead Morrissey’s Among Communists, is set against the distinctive cultural milieu of Belfast Communism – its smokey rooms, protests, marches, sports days, holidays, discos and Party bazaars – telling a history of the Troubles unlike any other.
Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium tells the story of his eccentric great-grandfather, a Jewish scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and possessed a troublingly encyclopedic knowledge of poison gases. Considering the long half-life of trauma and the ever-evasive nature of truth, this book is witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising.
In association with the Welsh Government
Sinéad was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013.
In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinéad Morrissey was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdańsk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
Joe is a poet and novelist. His debut novel, Submarine, was translated into fifteen languages and made into an award-winning film. His second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. His debut poetry collection, O Positive, was published by Faber & Faber in 2019. His latest book, Children of Radium – a memoir about family and chemical weapons – was published in April 2025 and adapted into an award-winning podcast for BBC Radio 4. He was born in Swansea and lives in London.
